Robinhood Feels Chill as Crypto Slump Cools Revenue

Platforms built on high engagement can feel it first when enthusiasm starts to fade.

That was the story behind Robinhood’s latest fourth quarter 2025 financial results. The company’s earnings call on Tuesday (Feb. 10) highlighted a business grappling with two simultaneous slowdowns.

Crypto trading volumes, once a powerful engine of growth, have cooled. At the same time, retail equity and options trading activity has declined as individual investors pull back amid market volatility, higher interest rates and competing demands on household capital.

“Our vision hasn’t changed: we are building the Financial SuperApp,” said Vlad Tenev, chairman and CEO of Robinhood, pointing to the company’s work in prediction markets as a new growth area and noting that activity in event contracts hit record levels in both Q4 and January.

For 2025 as a whole, the company delivered a record $4.5 billion in revenues and $2.05 diluted EPS, with net deposits hitting a high of $68.1 billion and funded customers reaching 27 million.

Still, Robinhood’s operating environment is intensifying in its competition. The retail trading moment of the early decade has given way to a more competitive parity where user incentives and differentiated services matter more than ever. Traditional brokerages have modernized their platforms, while FinTech peers are dabbling in expanded offerings that blur the lines between savings, investing and payments.

Robinhood’s share price is down around 25% year-to-date, and fell around 7% in after-hours trading.

See more: Robinhood Takes On Coinbase as Stock and Crypto Overlap

A Business Model Tied to Market Mood

Still, despite its headline revenue miss for the most recent quarter, Robinhood’s underlying metrics showed areas of strategic progress. Transaction-based revenues, though cyclical, remained strong, and other revenues, which include Robinhood Gold subscriptions, rose 70% to $331 million, adding recurring revenue that is less tied to daily market churn.

Gold subscribers reached 4.2 million by year-end, representing over 15% of funded customers.

“2025 was a record year where we set new highs for net deposits, Gold Subscribers, trading volumes, revenues, and profits, and we closed the year with a strong Q4,” said Shiv Verma, Robinhood CFO. “2026 is off to a strong start, and we are incredibly excited about our plan and momentum for the year ahead as we focus on shipping great products for customers and driving profitable growth for shareholders.”

Robinhood’s revenue miss was largely due to a 38% year-over-year decline in crypto trading revenue, which fell short of estimates. Options revenue was also below expectations.

For Robinhood, the crypto slowdown is especially impactful because digital assets have historically generated higher per-transaction revenue than equities. A contraction in crypto trading therefore carries an outsized effect on total transaction-based revenue, even if equity trading remains relatively stable.

Executives stressed that Robinhood has actively pushed into new product lines that could, over time, reshape its revenue profile. Prediction markets, fractional investing and expanded offerings in equities, options and net interest income have the potential to create steadier income streams.

“We’re moving toward a world where crypto is no longer an asset but an infrastructure substrate for all other assets … In the future, you’ll see crypto and financial services increasingly merge,” Tenev said.

See also: Tokenization’s Institutional Pitch Hits a Liquidity Wall

The Maturation Challenge

Looking ahead, Robinhood provided guidance for 2026 operating expenses and share-based compensation of roughly $2.6 billion to $2.725 billion, indicating continued investment in scaling and product development.

To fuel its growth roadmap, Robinhood also stressed how it is using AI internally to drive efficiency, particularly across software engineering and customer support.

“Seventy-five percent of customer support cases are being solved by AI, including the complex cases,” Tenev said.

Research in a PYMNTS Intelligence report, “How Agentic AI Went From Zero to CFO Test Runs in 90 Days,” has shown that close to 7% of enterprise CFOs in the U.S. have already deployed agentic AI in live finance workflows, while an additional 5% are running pilots.

And the impact of AI across the enterprise was highlighted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in her thought leadership series, “What 2026 Will Make Obvious: Ten Structural Shifts Reshaping Payments, Commerce and the AI Economy,” where she noted that “enough organizations crossed the line from experimentation to use that the argument about whether AI is ‘real’  has largely been resolved.”